I decided to do an experiment on my intellect this weekend, I would expose myself to the rhetoric of what is portrayed as the far right wing. I know what I mean by the term right wing, I am in no doubt about what I see this term to represent, but that may change as I absorb thoughts, reason, and opinion from the people, or mainly the person, I will listen to. Tommy Robinson, is often mooted as the voice of extremism, right wing extremism, racism, fascism, and thuggery. I wanted to know what he had to say, not because I wanted to argue with it, but because I wished to understand it. I know that I am a left wing sort of thinker, but I also know I don’t agree with what seems to be the modern core defining causes of the left, as maybe understood and expressed by someone like Owen Jones. I’m a huge fan of Jones when he is talking or writing about inequality and politics, but not so much when his subject is sexual rights because I can’t get there with him. I know what he says comes from a good place, a deeply held concern for people, especially the little people. I think no person is right or left, just leaning that way per subject, but some subjects have greater importance than others.
What I wanted to know was could I be swayed by writers and speakers from what I might describe as ‘the other side’, and I hoped that this would at least be partially true. The reason being that I do not wish to be a limited thinker and I do not want to think of myself as closed-minded. So, I picked a controversial figure, put aside what I already think, and listened without prejudice. The first thing I absorbed was the documentary Silenced, it’s available on YouTube. In this, Tommy acts the journalist and gathers eye witness testimonies regarding a very public sequence of events involving a school that were opined upon by mainstream media and some celebrity voices. His motivation was to expose a created and manipulated narrative for being just that, bullshit in other words. He interviewed people who had had their words marginalised for the sake of this created narrative, exposed where testimonies had been left out of court cases, uncovered eye witness based profiles of the persons in question, and presented an alternative overall view of the circumstances of the incident and what led up to it. Truths and facts are hard to argue with, and what Robinson does here is not mere speculations, he is giving voice to the participants, not speaking for them, an important journalistic difference.
Context matters, language matters. While it is perfectly true to say only that a person was attacked by another person, then judge that attack as wrong by our moral standards, and hope that that limited portion of the story will sway people to feel a certain way, it is dangerous to leave out the rest of what matters. We allow ourselves to support violence when it has leading context, where we can understand it as retribution, defence, or in some cases as a stabilising measure to prevent a worse outcome, but violent action presented in isolation is easily rationalised as merely the work of a motivated thug that harbours and acts on a prejudice. The media do a very good job of presenting Tommy Robinson as a prejudiced thug, and that’s what I thought of him before I knew anything. I’m going back to before an earlier post, I am actually familiar with the work of TR and have blogged about him before now. I picked this person because I wanted a deeper dive, I didn’t pick anyone like Lawrence Fox or Nigel Farage because I didn’t wish to see the motivations of the right from the perspective of rich twits that know no different than the elitist training they grew up with. Theirs is a Hobbesian approach, a toffs view of the world. I wanted to know why a person from a humble background, the son of traditional Labour voters, a working class man from an industrial background thought what he thought.
So, does Tommy have anything worth listening to? The answer to that is yes, he is quite a speaker and he has a lot to say that is well put, objectively true, worryingly sinister, and he can produce evidence to support his claims. This is not a man like David Iyke who just says things about power institutions and then never reveals any concrete basis to follow his thread, this is a guy who has interviews with involved persons on tape for all to see, who can produce letters from lawyers and government agencies. This guy had to be restrained from exercising free speech, not because he is spouting dangerous rhetoric, but because he had truths on his side that would make some government agency people look incompetent, others look complicit, and others look weak or corrupted. You watch any of Robinson’s output, or catch him in a podcast and you won’t find a thug, you’ll see a quite articulate guy that looks like a thug, sounds like a thug, but doesn’t say thuggish things, in fact it’s quite reasonable.
Now is he the sort of sophisticated orator that someone like a more developed and educated right wing character is? Let’s say Rees-Mogg, who talks as if he is a reasonable man of high education and finds easy answers to complex questions. No, Robinson is not like that, but what is the position each takes, what separates these supposed right wing examples? Rees-Mogg may be an economic thug who’s political stance is aristocratic in nature, he seems to believe in squeezing all the value out of the working class while at the same time reducing every right and benefit they are entitled to, because he may believe that entitlement is not a birth-right of a citizen, that there should be some sort of qualifying criteria. This is often the perspective of the toff, that they are valid in their position because of luck of birth, yet the commoner is invalid until they earn, and because they do not rise or achieve they must be slovenly or unworthy of wealth and power. Mogg takes an economic right wing stance and opposes collectivism, unionisation, rights, immigration, because any strength in the populous presents a force that might, and historically did, present a threat to his class. Robinson is not a natural bedfellow of Rees-Mogg, the only thing they agree on is that national identity is important to British people, yet for wildly differing reasons they find themselves on the same side. I think that it is a mistake on the part of Robinson to draw any strength from networks that align him with other right wing speakers, and in fact it burdens him with the same objections folks might make toward them. For Robinson, it is for the reason that he is not a well heeled orator that he is so easily reimagined as merely a thug, and that is our fault for favouring style over substance in our public speakers.
Immigration is, to Mogg I suspect, merely a political token to be used to further a political career. That political career being the fulcrum of a larger leaver that has a greater importance to him and his class, economic power. The business and financial world are deeply in politics not to provide for the populous, not to ensure fairness in law, not to heal the sick or educate the masses, but to prevent any challenge to the existing structures of the country, ones that act to keep current land distribution and wealth from being revised to become more honest and justifiable. To me the Conservative Party and Reform UK (and Labour under Starmer) are the expression the financial world, the rich, they do the work of propaganda and mass hysteria that is necessary to keep a population distracted from what matters, focussed and bogged down by the trivial, and angry over the unsolvable.
To Robinson a certain type of immigration is a threat to his class, which is not the same class as Rees-Mogg is in, in that the inclusion of non-compatible ideologically driven males from certain parts of the world is a lived reality. For Rees-Mogg the view of the inner city is from above, the view of foreign cultures is in a book, or during a visit where he is a guest of the foreign regime’s well behaved wealthy. For Robinson it is on the streets of his town, it’s in his face, he went to school with it, he and his people have been harassed by it, his female friends have to endure what it considers them to be. Remember that some of the principles of the particular culture he opposes the most, view anyone outside it as second class, and anyone that happens to be female, even those within it, to hold very little value. What is not at all valued is easily abused. For this reason I am compelled to agree with Tommy, and I will not understand why you do not either. If I had to guess at why, I might say that you may be badly informed if you are so tolerant that you would welcome those that hate you and wish you dead, converted, or conquered and subjugated.
What Robinson points out is that a culture of tolerance and consideration toward difference, on our part, which seems noble on paper but does not work in reality, has led to government agencies being unable, or unwilling, to treat the representatives of this non-compatible culture with the same set of rules, our British laws, as they would in the case of peoples from other cultures. This is basically the crux of his entire campaign and argument, he does not speak on benefits, environmentalist, economics, transport, or sexual identities, so he is a singular political force. It is not racially charged, it cannot be, for the simple fact that he himself is often surrounded and supported by people of ethnic diversity. He is supported by Caribbeans and Indians and Chinese people (of cultural heritage). It’s not religious because he seems not to be a religious man (I’m guessing, I see nothing to indicate a church based mentality other than the occasional wearing of a cross, and that means little more than fashion these days).
This is culture plain and simple, and it’s not a preservation of some skewed idea of Anglo-Saxon either, not purely. I think the EDL as a reactionary force attracted that sort yes, but any emerging movement has not the position that allows for the picking and choosing of it’s members, at least not while it still grows. That comes later of course, when it is in a position of some strength. Robinson broke from the institution he founded and I think that was because it became associated with thuggery and maybe lost the message he set out to convey. for that, if I am correct, then I think that’s commendable.
Robinson is a crusader on a campaign that puts our institutions under the magnifying glass, which if course it should always be. This crusade asks those institutions to justify the why and how of examples where their apparent tolerance has led to inaction on cases where there have been accusations and evidence but no actions on their part. Now we all understand why this is, it’s for the optics, for government to not look bad in their policies they have to portray a set of statistics that looks balanced and therefore the required stats lead the actions taken. So rather than uniform policing and treatment of the population we get a blind eye turned so that accusations are not made. Robinson contends that his cultural demographic receive heavy handed actions in concern of law, but the same cannot be said for the growing numbers of non-compatible cultural persons who are among us and in his city. The optics are harming real people when the forces that act to enforce laws are not willing to investigate certain demographics because they are afraid of potential accusation of unfairness. This approach creates unfairness.
I am not only convinced now that Tommy Robinson is a relatively decent man, I also feel I have learned a lot from his output. I’m not 100% with him, I think his approach and his style could use some work. I think he is making mistakes in accepting the support of some more extreme fellows, and I think he should work more on the ordinary reasonable persons among us and harder to detach himself from those that harm his cause.
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